Race and Ethnicity
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■ RACE AND ETHNICITY Broad-ranging and comprehensive, this incisive new textbook examines the shifting meanings of ‘race’ and ethnicity and collates the essential concepts in one indispensable companion volume. From Marxist views to post-colonialism, this book investigates the attendant debates, issues and analyses within the context of global change. Using international case studies from Australia, Malaysia, the Caribbean, Mexico and the UK and examples of popular imagery that help to explain the more difficult elements of theory, this key text focuses on everyday life issues such as: • ethnic conflicts and polarised states • racism(s) and policies of multiculturalism • diasporas, asylum seekers and refugees • mixed race and hybrid identity Incorporating summaries, questions, illustrations, exercises and a glossary of terms, this student-friendly text also puts forward suggestions for further project work. Broad in scope, interactive and accessible, this book is a key resource for undergraduate and postgraduate level students of ‘race’ and ethnicity across the social sciences. Stephen Spencer is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Sheffield Hallam University. His recent publications include: A Dream Deferred: Ethnic Identity in Guyana (Dido Press, forthcoming) and Social Identities: Multidisciplinary Approaches with Gary Taylor (Routledge 2004). RACE AND ETHNICITY Culture, identity and representation Stephen Spencer First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2006 Stephen Spencer This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0–415–35125–3 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–35124–1 (pbk) ■ CONTENTS List of illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi Introduction: images of others, images of ourselves xiii 1 Representation 1 And now the news . 13 January 2005 3 Complex war 6 Reading images of others 8 What is the Other? 8 Barthes and the reader’s role in constructing meanings 14 Rhetorical images 17 Whiteness as myth 20 Scared? 22 The Matrix of Cultural Identity 24 Production 25 Consumption 26 Identity 26 Regulation 27 Representation 27 Chapter summary and exercises 28 2 The Politics of Naming 31 Defining race and ethnicity 32 ‘Race’ 33 Shifting meanings of race 34 Monogenism 34 Polygenism 36 Evolutionism 38 Race and class 43 v CONTENTS Race as culture 44 Ethnicity 45 Race as ethnicity 47 Chapter summary and exercise 53 3 Colonialism: Invisible Histories 55 Construction of the colonial subject 57 Slavery 57 Enlightenment views 60 Rationalisation of colonial exploitation 63 Effects of colonialism 67 Reparation movement 69 Neo-colonialism and auto-colonialism 70 Chapter summary and exercises 73 4 Theories of Race and Ethnicity 76 Primordial or instrumental ethnicity 76 Criticisms of primordialism 78 Instrumentalism 78 Criticisms of instrumentalism 79 Plural society theories 80 Marxist theories 82 Structuralist criticism of Marxism 89 Weberian/neo-Weberian theories 92 Symbolic interactionism 96 Foucault and discourse theory 98 Bourdieu 101 Gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity 105 Black feminism 107 Chapter summary and exercise 113 5 Identity: Marginal Voices and the Politics of Difference 115 Postmodernity: maps and terrain 116 Holocaust and relativity 116 Identity politics and traditional Left thought 119 Consequences of postmodern thought 120 Post-colonial identities 121 Theories of post-colonialism 123 Feminism and post-colonialism 125 Chapter summary and exercise 134 vi CONTENTS 6 Case Study: Indigenous Australians 136 Land rights 137 Living conditions 138 Contested homelands: Darwin’s ‘itinerant problem’ 142 Framing the fringe dwellers 142 The ‘itinerant problem’: community conditions 146 Law and order 147 Media manifestations 148 Deconstructing ‘the itinerant problem’ 154 Larrakia Nation 156 Conclusion 160 Postscript 161 Theoretical framing 161 Plural society theory 162 Marxist approaches 162 Weberian notes 163 Elite theory 164 Postmodernity 165 Symbolic interactionism 166 Rational-choice theory 167 Chapter summary and exercise 167 7 Conflict 169 ‘Race riots’ or social and economic exclusion 174 The struggle for symbolic dominance 175 The persistence of ethnic stereotypes 177 African-Guyanese stereotypes 177 The Other’s theft of legitimate pleasures 179 Religion 185 Conflict resolution 186 Chapter summary and exercises 187 8 Living the Contradiction 189 Diaspora and hybridity 189 Multiculturalism 205 History and the conception of the multicultural state 205 What is multiculturalism? 206 Promise and reality: life in a multicultural society 207 Critics of multiculturalism 208 Impact of multiculturalism 209 Chapter summary and exercises 214 vii CONTENTS 9 Futures 217 Mixed race 222 Significance for theorising racialisation 225 Race in cyberspace 227 A pair of brown eyes 228 Conclusions and exercise 231 Glossary 235 Bibliography 250 Index 269 viii ■ ILLUSTRATIONS FIGURES 1.1 The process of signification 14 1.2 Stone Age people of the desert 18 1.3 Negro women tending young sugar canes 18 1.4 Scared? 23 1.5 Matrix of Cultural Identity 25 2.1 Negroes 40 2.2 Mongols 41 2.3 Ethnic categories used in the 1991 Census 49 2.4 Ethnic categories used in the 2001 Census 50 2.5 Typical breakdown of ethnic categories in the US Census 52 3.1 Defaced statue of Queen Victoria, Georgetown, Guyana 55 4.1 Dynamics of plural society 81 5.1 Kabyle 127 5.2 Sudanese 128 5.3 Arabia 129 5.4 Veils, Egypt 130 5.5 ‘A Pleasing Contrast’ 132 6.1 Australia, from terra nullius, ‘empty’, in 1788 to ‘full’ in 1988 138 6.2 ‘Breathing while Black’ 139 6.3 ‘Australian Aborigines’ – typical representations of Aboriginal culture 145 6.4 Front page of Northern Territory News, 15 April 2003 149 6.5 ‘Amongst the Queensland Blacks’ 151 6.6 ‘Nature – Civilization’ 151 6.7 ‘England – Blackfellows at home’ 152 6.8 ‘Purposeful drinking’ 153 6.9 David Timber, Coordinator of the Kumbutjil Association at One Mile Dam Community near Darwin 160 ix ILLUSTRATIONS 7.1 ‘Only believe all things are possible’ 172 8.1 Zapata sign for underground station Zapata in Mexico City 203 8.2 Beginning the struggle – Zapatistas in San Cristobal de Las Casas 1991 204 8.3 Celebrating diversity 212 9.1 ‘Life Savers’ 229 TABLES 1.1 Shifting faces of the Other 12 2.1 Evolving discourses of race 35 6.1 Patterns of indigenous disadvantage 139 x ■ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many thanks to all of those who contributed their voices to this book. Special thanks to Chas Critcher, for allowing me to use extracts from a filmed interview; to Mark Quah for the interviews with British Chinese people and to Stuart who added an articulate personal perspective on the British-Born Chinese identity. Thanks to Dr Yvonne Howard-Bunt for providing some thoughts on mixed- race identity and also to Diego Uribe for his insightful comments on the eve of his return to Mexico. I am indebted to David Timber and the Kumbutjil Community at One Mile Dam in Darwin for allowing me to use interview material and some stills from a film made there, and to Mick Lambe, a stalwart campaigner and now Kumbutjil Project Officer (in residence), for his assistance in understanding a complex situation and for permission in using imagery from the Pariah website which he developed and hosts. Thank you also to the Malaysian students whose candid comments provided insight into the situation there. Certain sections of this book draws on case-study material from Guyana which is due to be part of a text called A Dream Deferred: Ethnic Identity in Guyana (to be published by Dido Press). The case study in Chapter 6 (concerning Aboriginal community in Darwin) is a modification of an article to be published in the Pacific Journalism Review, Auckland University, April 2005. Thanks also to: The Commission for Racial Equality for permission to use the Scared? poster from their 1998 campaign. Northern Territory News for the use of the front page, 15 April 2003. Ross Woodrow, Newcastle University, NSW, Australia for his permission to include three illustrations: Amongst the Queensland Blacks, Queensland Figaro, 10 December 1888; Nature – Civilization, Queensland Figaro, 6 August 1887, and England – Blackfellows at home: They are kindly received in fashionable circles – ladies play the piano to them etc. Sydney Punch, 15 August 1868. New Scotland Yard for permission to use the Life Savers police anti-terrorist poster. xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publisher would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of the book. xii ■ INTRODUCTION Images of others, images of ourselves Consider the following image. Paul Sharrad comments on a press photo from the 1991 Gulf War: In a camp of refugee workers from Kuwait containing amongst others, Indians, Pakistanis, Nepalis and Arabs of inconvenient nationality without the means of getting home, there huddled a group of Filipinos, triangulated like paintings of Custer’s Last Stand or the Iwo Jima statue under a flag which pleaded ‘Don’t leave us among Asians’. (Sharrad 1993: 1) This strange image is an excellent example of the complex negotiated identities that exist amongst global diasporas.